Narrative

For my final project, I chose to tell the story of the Crusade for Children. All three images have a curves effect on them that made almost everything a shade of blue. I did this to symbolize the colors of the Crusade this year. Every year the Crusade has a different color theme; this year was blue, dark green, and tan. In the first image, "Collect the Money," I chose to put a boot full of money, a fire truck, and a fire hat to tell this part of the story. They show that the firemen collect money every year for the Crusade.

For the second image, "Wait to go on Air," I chose to do kind of a split-look to show what goes on in WHAS 11 and what goes on outside before each fire department goes on air. On the left side, there fire departments getting on the huge elevator to go up on stage; while on the right side, the firemen driving the trucks are waiting to drive down the street on the air. I used the boots at the bottom to kind of tie the two scenes together, and show that they are happening at the same time.

In the last image, "On the Air: Show me the Money," I also have two scenes happening at the same time. The fire trucks outside drive down the street and go right in front of WHAS 11's studio to be on air; while the scene at the bottom is of the same fire department standing on stage while on the air. The empty boots at the bottom represent that the money was given from the fire departments to the Crusade. I chose to do this story because my family is really big into the Crusade, and we work it every year.

Fortuna/Loteria

For this assignment, I chose to use games of chance as my inspiration. I used poker chips, dice, and playing cards as the basis of my images. The first image, "Let's Take a Chance," has a lot going on. The background is a scanned image of an ace of clubs duplicated over and over. I used the curves tool to get the background that color. The pile of poker chips also has a curves effect on them to make them look metallic. The flower-looking-thing is a collage of scanned items. I also used the curves tool on this collage, too. It made it look brighter and stand out. The hands that hold the cards and the hand that holds the dice have their original color. The flower also has a unique feature in that it has a piece of every other layer: die and chip in the center, and cards as it's petals.

The second image, "Read 'em and Weep," does not have as much going on. It is more simple. The background is a picture of a bunch of dice stacked on top of each other. The color of the cards has been altered. I used all the colors from the four chips to recreate the cards. This makes the cards really stand out and bring out the colors of the chips that are below them. The chips were all scanned into the computer and the image of the joker on top of them was also scanned into the computer. The joker was actually riding a bike on the joker-card, but I cropped that and selected the joker so that you could see what was underneath it. I then placed the joker over-top each colored-chip and flattened the together to give each chip a new look. I placed them at the bottom to kind of make a small border, and so that you could still see the dice background.

Surreal Landscape or Cityscape

This assignment was more challenging for me because it was hard to visualize what I wanted the images to look like. I had a hard time figuring out which images to use and what to do with them to make them look surreal. The first image, "Pop-out Louisville," is based on some surreal images I found on the Internet. I really liked the way certain parts of the scene pops out at you. I randomly chose which parts of my image would pop out. I just cropped different parts of the original image and placed them directly over the working image in the correct spots. I then added a drop shadow and made the color a little different to make the images stand out. I will say that I did forget to put a texture on this image. I'm hoping that I can make up for that in the next one because I used two different textures (see next description to find out what I used).

The second image, "Waterfall Trail," is basically an image of a house sitting in the middle of a body of water next to a waterfall. There is a trail connected to the house. The whole background has a green bush texture behind it to make the image look distorted. I lowered the opacity of the other layers so that the green bush showed through, which you can see it better on the print out. The building also has a texture. I used a clipping mask to give the building a wooded texture. The texture is actually a picture of logs I took. I lowered the opacity of the building so that the logs would show through.